Choosing a PHP integrated development environment

PHP ROUNDUP

Shopping for a PHP integrated development environment? We test drive a few of the leading candidates.

Long gone are the days when developers would edit source code in vi and run cc from the command line. Modern IDEs perform a wide range of functions directly from a single interface, and you never need to see a shell prompt. Several useful IDEs are available for PHP development – the right tool for you may depend on your needs and your taste for complexity. In this article, I take at closer look at some popular PHE IDEs. I started with a small, newly created project consisting of just a handful of files. Then, I took an existing project that consisted of a PHPNuke installation, containing about 26,000 files, half of which are PHP files, but only a couple dozen of those files are changed with any frequency. Each of the products allowed me to import existing files to varying degrees. In some cases, the product simply includes everything in the specified directory without question. In other cases, users are prompted for the types of files to include.